Raymond's Newbie Thoughts

[BartonThinks 3,416]

"Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200."

I'm having a nightmare of a time finding the thread where someone proved that you could enable mixed-use RCI by modding either the 0x03 RCI exemplars or the 0x04 Developer exemplars. If anyone knows what I'm talking about and can track down that thread, let me know. Google, ST search, and trawling the forums are all failing me.

[mattb325 28,880]

I've never seen something that mentions dual occupancy can be done and I've been interested in it since we were testing it way back in 2009...I'm not sure something like it exists (for dual occupancy, that is)

The category of 0x03 RCI Exemplars and 0x04 Developer Exemplars sits in the property Exemplar Type | 0x00000010.

For any ploppable building or RCI growable it has to be set to 0x02 which is 'buildings' 

Changing the category in the reader from 0x02 to 0x03 or 0x04 causes the building to disappear from the menu.

If attempting to use the 'lot plop' cheat from the extra cheats menu, the game immediately crashes with either of these settings.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

48 minutes ago, BartonThinks said:

If anyone knows what I'm talking about and can track down that thread, let me know.

I'm not sure whether this is what you're searching for...

But just wondering if you might be remembering this thread @Terring posted:
 

 

With the RCImulti mod inasmuch as the home jobs might be remembered for a dual occupancy purpose.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

@Cyclone Boom Thank you!!! The RCIMulti mod is what I was thinking about. I'll have to take a look and see whether it works the way I remember and if it has any potential to be repurposed.

 

Edit: I definitely misremembered part of how this mod works. I thought that it added commercial and/or industrial jobs to residential buildings. That doesn't seem to be the case, and I'm still not entirely sure how the jobs (or the mod) works.

The mod itself is remarkably simple. It just takes the R$ Census, R$$ Census, and R$$$ Census exemplars and adds a new "Satisfies" property which mirrors the "Drives" property. That is, the residential lots appear to be satisfying their own drives.

As @Terring's post demonstrates, the mods causes the game to treat residential buildings as having jobs for the purposes of assigning sims to jobs and mapping out commutes--but I'm not sure if the "jobs" created by this mod are otherwise treated as jobs by the game. I'd need to test it out in-game to see how it affects workforce numbers. I suspect that it causes sims to "disappear" from the workforce census numbers. I'd also be interested in how it affects the commercial and industrial demand drives (if at all).

In any case, I don't think this offers a path to implementing a separate class of mixed-use zoning, since there's no way to implement a similar change without affecting all R$, R$$, and/or R$$$ lots.

Edit 2: That said, one possibility that may be worth exploring is whether this mod can be adapted so that R$$$ lots generate jobs for R$ workers, e.g., cooks, babysitters, cleaning staff, etc. If I'm reading the exemplars correctly, this would be possible by having the R$$$ Census satisfy R$ demand. It's not the "mixed use" unicorn, but it could be an interesting way to add another wrinkle of realism to the game.

[Propfam 2,288]

5 hours ago, BartonThinks said:

That said, one possibility that may be worth exploring is whether this mod can be adapted so that R$$$ lots generate jobs for R$ workers, e.g., cooks, babysitters, cleaning staff, etc.

We need that. As much as they claim all achievements on their own name, I guess, they still need those peasants. Posh building requires lots of workers (in scale of residential, ofc) and while you can automate that using Roomba et al, I don't think there's a wide scale application of them to handle all of housekeeping. Don't forget, I don't think Spot of Boston Dynamics et al can replace human as babysitters. That would be weird experience, especially for rich babies.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Actually and Honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about exactly even if you speak my language. But I do remember this mod many years ago while only playing the game and knew nothing about Modding, I can still vaguely recall that it could make sims working at home and some other crazy functions.

This is a posts maybe related to it though it seemed that they were talking about another version of SC.

Spoiler

[Andrew] The underlying simulator definitely supports this. It's more of a gameplay/UI question to be honest, namely, how we handle designating mixed use zones, and how much that would impact the gameplay in the core game. Would the resulting game be as fun for all players? It's something we'll try and see how it works out.

Even if it doesn't make sense as part of the core game, you make a good point. Because the sim is completely data-driven, maybe in future we could think about releasing an "urban planning" version of the game that emphasises urban planning tools over the more traditional SimCity gameplay

There were some Properties which didn't exist in any Exemplar, I simply split them into two parts, whether or not in hardcode(Only for private study purposes) This "Allow Joint Occupancy" mentioned by @mattb325 appears once. It's in a function as a condition for determine statements, and this function is invoked by another one. I couldn't understand the whole functions, There were only some human readable key words within as below:

[Building, Item name, Wealth, Building %s has a bad wealth property, Purpose, Capacity Satisfied, Allow Joint Occupancy, Construction time, Occupant Size, Plop Cost, Static Occupant Families.] 

I don't think this will be helpful, and I don't have that amazing perseverance @GoaSkin mentioned to guess out the specific function. However, I'm very glad to see some Veterans talking about their good memories and experiences. 

Anyway, I have totally understood the Item Button ID, as its name implies, This Item (Exemplar(Brush, zone tools,etc)) invokes function (hardcode) by a Button ID, most of these IDs have been defined in UI's Button elements, some of them in Exemplars, as for the others, we have to guess such as that 4 hidden zone types (0X0F worked as well, and when if click the Seaport and Airport zone, its property panel will pop up.). This feature & wincustom & captions will be extremely useful to my UI Mod.

Along with digging Puzzle X, I came across Puzzle Y again,

@Cyclone Boom Hiya CB, Was this Cheat spotted before? 

[Propfam 2,288]

1 hour ago, Raymond7cn said:

Actually and Honestly, I have no idea what you are talking about exactly even if you speak my language. But I do remember this mod many years ago while only playing the game and knew nothing about Modding, I can still vaguely recall that it could make sims working at home and some other crazy functions.

This is a posts maybe related to it though it seemed that they were talking about another version of SC.

  Content (Hide contents)

[Andrew] The underlying simulator definitely supports this. It's more of a gameplay/UI question to be honest, namely, how we handle designating mixed use zones, and how much that would impact the gameplay in the core game. Would the resulting game be as fun for all players? It's something we'll try and see how it works out.

Even if it doesn't make sense as part of the core game, you make a good point. Because the sim is completely data-driven, maybe in future we could think about releasing an "urban planning" version of the game that emphasises urban planning tools over the more traditional SimCity gameplay

There were some Properties which didn't exist in any Exemplar, I simply split them into two parts, whether or not in hardcode(Only for private study purposes) This "Allow Joint Occupancy" mentioned by @mattb325 appears once. It's in a function as a condition for determine statements, and this function is invoked by another one. I couldn't understand the whole functions, There were only some human readable key words within as below:

[Building, Item name, Wealth, Building %s has a bad wealth property, Purpose, Capacity Satisfied, Allow Joint Occupancy, Construction time, Occupant Size, Plop Cost, Static Occupant Families.] 

I don't think this will be helpful, and I don't have that amazing perseverance @GoaSkin mentioned to guess out the specific function. However, I'm very glad to see some Veterans talking about their good memories and experiences. 

Anyway, I have totally understood the Item Button ID, as its name implies, This Item (Exemplar(Brush, zone tools,etc)) invokes function (hardcode) by a Button ID, most of these IDs have been defined in UI's Button elements, some of them in Exemplars, as for the others, we have to guess such as that 4 hidden zone types (0X0F worked as well, and when if click the Seaport and Airport zone, its property panel will pop up.). This feature & wincustom & captions will be extremely useful to my UI Mod.

Along with digging Puzzle X, I came across Puzzle Y again,

@Cyclone Boom Hiya CB, Was this Cheat spotted before? 

Is it a game label or that decay you talked about before?

[BartonThinks 3,416]

5 hours ago, chfzdn said:

We need that.

I'll need to poke around more to see if I can get it to work, as it's something I'd like to use for my own cities. Not sure when I'll get around to it, though. I'm a little busy trying to learn how to BAT at the moment. 

Assuming this works the way I think it works, there are a few wrinkles that would need to be ironed out. Right now, I'm not quite sure how you'd solve these problems...

• The R$ jobs at R$$$ residences would take R$ jobs out of the workforce, but if the workforce drives for R$ sims remain unchanged, that could generate a surplus of demand for commercial and industrial jobs that throws off the balance of the game. I'm not sure how you'd correct for that issue, since there's I'm not sure how you could account for the new jobs at R$$$ residences in the workforce and occupation drives.
• The mod would require overriding the R$$$ census. As noted above, it may also require adjusting additional RCI and Developer exemplars. That would pose a compatibility problem. At bare minimum, it would conflict with CAM. So if you wanted a CAM-patible version, you'd need a separate CAM version of the mod. This would need to be done for any other mod where there's an override conflict.

5 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

There were some Properties which didn't exist in any Exemplar, I simply split them into two parts, whether or not in hardcode(Only for private study purposes) This "Allow Joint Occupancy" mentioned by @mattb325 appears once. It's in a function as a condition for determine statements, and this function is invoked by another one. I couldn't understand the whole functions, There were only some human readable key words within as below:

[Building, Item name, Wealth, Building %s has a bad wealth property, Purpose, Capacity Satisfied, Allow Joint Occupancy, Construction time, Occupant Size, Plop Cost, Static Occupant Families.] 

I don't think this will be helpful, and I don't have that amazing perseverance @GoaSkin mentioned to guess out the specific function. However, I'm very glad to see some Veterans talking about their good memories and experiences. 

Now I am the one who has (mostly) no idea what you are talking about! 

If I understand even 25% of what you're saying, this sounds like it could be promising. Two possibilities come to mind:

• Maybe the Allow Joint Occupancy property is hardcoded so that it only works if certain conditions are met within the properties you've listed? That could mean the property can be activated if we can figure out these conditions. And if the conditions were not properly implemented, it would narrow down which functions need to be adjusted to activate this property.
• Maybe the Allow Joint Occupancy property isn't supposed to be applied to individual building exemplars, but to RCI or developer exemplars instead, which would allow joint occupancy to function within that class of building?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

1. "Low Density Residential"                Item Button ID = 1
2. "Medium Density Residential"         Item Button ID = 2
3. "High Density Residential"               Item Button ID = 3
4. "Low Density Commercial"              Item Button ID = 4
5. "Medium Density Commercial"       Item Button ID = 5
6. "High Density Commercial"             Item Button ID = 6
7. "Resource Industrial"                        Item Button ID = 7
8. "Light Industrial"                                Item Button ID = 8
9. "Heavy Industrial"                              Item Button ID = 9
10. "Military"                                             Item Button ID = A
11. "Airport"                                              Item Button ID = B
12. "Seaport"                                            Item Button ID = C
13. "Spaceport"                                        Item Button ID = D
14. "Landfill"                                             Item Button ID = E
15. "Plopped Building"                            Item Button ID = F

@BartonThinks, Yes, Barton, it has possibilities, IMO. But I can't ensure it, since everything is possible in a Newbie's world.  

Anyway, Above is a list I have confirmed in hardcode (tough digging) that the whole zone types we have, as far as I can tell it seemed there wasn't any difference between them and other types existed. But I'm not 100% sure about this, Further and deep research are required. BTW, These types have been defined in Query.txt as well.

Furthermore, within the same function, This seemed to be another hierarchy definition:

"Residence" =1, 

"Services" =2, 

"Office" =3,

"Tourism" =4, 

"Agriculture" =5,

 "Processing" =6, 

"Manufacturing" =7, 

"High Tech" =8.

Besides, I dimly remembered that @Terring has metioned some hidden transit types as well, Anyway, I got this two Unknown (probably just me):

Pothole_Rail 

Dirt_Road

May I ask what's a Pothole or Pothole Rail? It's not rail or other I have seen in vanilla SC4, since I could see other names there. As for the Dirt Road, I guess that it's probably SAM, Right?

I want to dig more deeper tomorrow about Decal, as @chfzdn said, I have looked forward it for a while, way back to signpost, But the Decal system in SC4 is more interesting, It can stretch along with Terrain forming, less burden to game's performance. But the only problem by now was that I couldn't save it, But today, I found that I could save this textdecal just as Labels, Meanwhile from wiki, I got the zone is also a Decal, so tomorrow I'd like to start from @CorinaMarie's Deuteranopia Zone Manager, Just a little question, Why most of those Properties in Zone Manager simulator have 16 Reps?

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

@BartonThinks Hiya Barton, You reacted my post I wrote with a bad Internet (proxy), Please check it out again.

@junspud Oh my old friend, Sorry that I forgot to reply you, Thank you so much for helping me with testing of those Brushes. Sincerely looking forward to your suggestions. Thank you in advance.

[BartonThinks 3,416]

@Raymond7cn

The Dirt Road we know about. That was supposed to be a new type of network, but Maxis never added it to the base game. It was discovered pretty early, and the NAM uses it as the basis for the RHW network.

Regarding the reps in the Zone Manager...

• I'm not sure what the first rep does. My guess is that it offers "universal" or "baseline" values for how the zone manager works overall.
• Reps 2 through 10 are used for the nine types of RCI zoning. If you look at the values, they match up exactly with the RCI zone behaviors.
• I assume reps 11 through 14 are for the military, airport, seaport, and spaceport zones. If you've activated these zones using the button IDs, you can try modding these values to see if this changes the zoning behavior or how the zones appear in the game.
• Rep 15 is for landfill zoning.
• I assume rep 16 is for Plopped Building zoning.

[Terring 6,473]

2 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

May I ask what's a Pothole or Pothole Rail? It's not rail or other I have seen in vanilla SC4, since I could see other names there.

I'm curious about it too

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

Random thought...

Perhaps Maxis made a typo for that, and it was intended to be Pothole Trail instead. I've not heard of it before, but it seems this might refer to a walking path in California. And with Maxis based in the same state of America, maybe they were referring to a network like the JS Dirt Paths possibly.
 

Spoiler

An actual pothole on a tram (GLR) track:

 

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

12 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

@Cyclone Boom Hiya CB, Was this Cheat spotted before?

Wow, very cool find, Raymond. I don't recall seeing or hearing of this before, so it looks like a new discovery as far as I know.

It looks similar to the labels possible to place in game already, but there it allows the coordinates to be set from the cheat command. I just gave this a test in game, and it does persist after saving a tile, and also can be conveniently renamed or deleted using the standard label tools. An interesting thing is if trying to move the TextDecal text, it changes to the larger green style. So it's like it reverts back to it based on what the control does, even though entering from the cheat it displays fine.

Here's a preview with the green text the default style, and TextDecal the bottom one:

[mattb325 28,880]

That decal cheat is great, Raymond...the old game still holds secrets. 

Speaking of which I have tweaked some additional settings on the 'allow dual occupancy' and I have made it work - partially 

The ploppable monopoly dual occupancy hotel had capacity satisfied of CS$35 CS$$11 and CO$$7 and with the old settings in the census repository only showed a total jobs capacity of 11 jobs. When queried it also only showed 11 jobs.

By making a tweak to the lot config, the census repository now shows 66 jobs:

and is able to support a lot more residents. When queried, it still only shows 11 jobs, but from the image it is obvious that many more sims are able to work at the hotel. How the game calculates 66 jobs from a maximum potential of only 53 is inexplicable at this stage...

So, given that this is twice as far as the testing we did 12 years ago, with that in mind I made a growable dual occupancy house. 

It is an R$ house for 9 sims and I added CS$ 9 jobs to it. (also utilising the lot config changes). Stats below:

 

 

 The dual occupancy house grew (the tests 12 years ago, IIRC they did not grow), but despite making the changes to the lot config that allowed the game to sort-of read the extra entries in the ploppable lot, everything just looked screwy in the census repository

However, the growable house did not abandon - it periodically showed a no job zot, and the population count switched between 0, 7 and 9 at various intervals and cycled through this indefinitely while running the game on cheetah speed.

So, it looks like it needs a lot more tweaking to actually make it worth while, and the fact remains, seeing it partially works, it may have been merely a coding stub that the developers intended to base an expansion pack on (which of course never eventuated)....

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Just a little question, Why most of those Properties in Zone Manager simulator have 16 Reps?

Based on the values in the first rep of each property, it looks like it should be for the No Can Do coloring. Like for the Drag Color it's 0xFF0000FF and that would be 255, 0, 0 for the RGB part and the last two digits are the opacity with FF (255) being 100% solid. However, changing the color code in rep 1 is not recognized in the game for zones too small or zones too large. That red color is either being set in another exemplar property or they may have hard coded it.

 

7 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Pothole_Rail 

I know if you significantly reduce Road Services funding you can get potholes on streets, roads, etc:

^ The potholes are the random black splotches which look like oil spill puddles.

Perhaps with DTR, they could also get pot holes on the rail lines too?

[BartonThinks 3,416]

@mattb325 That is an incredible development! Who would have thought?

[TheMurderousCricket 5,055]

6 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

Perhaps Maxis made a typo for that, and it was intended to be Pothole Trail instead.

California aside, this just sounds like an ultimate insult from the transportation advisor.

See, you SUCK soooo heavy that you've even allowed goddamn hiking trails to have potholes!

But apart from that, I thought that rail lines do have pothole textures for them. You're saying they don't...? 

[Propfam 2,288]

12 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Furthermore, within the same function, This seemed to be another hierarchy definition:

"Residence" =1, 

"Services" =2, 

"Office" =3,

"Tourism" =4, 

"Agriculture" =5,

 "Processing" =6, 

"Manufacturing" =7, 

"High Tech" =8.

It could be some specializations, isn't it? Like in C:S, if you decided to zone commercial service, you can set it either shops/services or tourism thru a policy. Office and residential zones will be set to 3 and 1 respectively. For no 5 and 6, it looks like that Maxis intended to make I-R as the one-catch-all zone for primary sector industries (aka industries that worked on extracting values from the ground). This is reinforced by the OG name of I-R, resource industry. But, due to complication of having mineral maps, Maxis could have been abandoned it. And, we get I-R for agriculture and I-D for other resource extractions and dirty manufacturing. Speaking of manufacturing and high-tech, same with office and residential, it's assigned to 7 and 8 respectively.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

20 hours ago, Cyclone Boom said:

An interesting thing is if trying to move the TextDecal text,

Please do teach me this, CB, I don't know how to move it or the Label.

@mattb325, Frankly, Matt, Though I haven't fully understood the importance of your finding, However, I really thought it deserves a dedicated thread. Congratulations!

18 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

However, changing the color code in rep 1 is not recognized in the game for zones too small or zones too large. That red color is either being set in another exemplar property or they may have hard coded it.

 

On 7/31/2021 at 1:55 AM, BartonThinks said:

Regarding the reps in the Zone Manager...

• I'm not sure what the first rep does. My guess is that it offers "universal" or "baseline" values for how the zone manager works overall.
• Reps 2 through 10 are used for the nine types of RCI zoning. If you look at the values, they match up exactly with the RCI zone behaviors.
• I assume reps 11 through 14 are for the military, airport, seaport, and spaceport zones. If you've activated these zones using the button IDs, you can try modding these values to see if this changes the zoning behavior or how the zones appear in the game.
• Rep 15 is for landfill zoning.
• I assume rep 16 is for Plopped Building zoning.

Thank you Cori and Barton, You were probably correct here, whereas I didn't make significant progress today, when I dragged those hidden Zones, still couldn't see the color there, I have tried many approaches to get some changes, but to no avail, How do those FSHs work is also a secret to me by now. Anyway, I will dig more deeper into hardcode someday, Here is those Hidden zones I made :

HIBI.dat

You could find them out from the zone residential menu if you have interested in this.

@Terring @Cyclone Boom @CorinaMarie, I believe Cori's judgment and CB's conjecture about typo were reasonable, I got some clues in Effdir:

I have no idea about the connection or resources of pothole and pothole rail, but the selectorls resources have been found in Simcity_2.dat, Just as Cori mentioned, (I have never experienced this while playing before, what a Newbie), About If we could have more flexible applications of them(paint the network by these Effects @Barroco Hispano), I thought it seems promising since we have CoriBoom.!

[Barroco Hispano 26,695]

@Raymond7cn That's the textures of theroad  bumps, right?

Btw, I want to replace the textures of the SimCity 4 effects (fire, explosion, etc) but I am very lazy to look for them in the .dat files 

[BartonThinks 3,416]

@Raymond7cn Have you tried using (or investigating) the DLL that @simmaster07 made for the hidden zones? Here's a link to the file, in case you missed it. He also includes the source code, so you can poke around to see how he accomplished his DLL, if you understand that type of coding.

I'm not sure if he got the zones to appear properly in the city view, but he was able to make them show up in zone view and region view, as per this post:

Would love to poke around in these files myself, but I haven't the faintest idea how DLLs work. 

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

2 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Please do teach me this, CB, I don't know how to move it or the Label.

Sure! Here are the steps...

Firstly in the "Landscape Tools" menu, click the Place Label option:

 

Then the cursor changes to a yellow text editing tool, and hovering over a Label or TextDecal makes them appear highlighted.

Next when left clicking and holding down the left click, it allows them to be moved:

(I also moved the Label as well.)

As can be seen here, the TextDecal does change to a standard green label once moved however. So for those it'll be worth setting via the x and z coordinates as you found from the TerrainQuery command. Since in game it doesn't seem possible to set them back to a label once they change style.

[Wiimeiser 444]

Joint occupancy is a weird thing. It seems it only works when one of the two is garbage. About a decade ago I had a lot that dealt with all three utilities at once, however, while the garbage and water processing worked fine, power output was always 0 no matter what. Which begs the question of what would happen if you made a residential lot that processed garbage, would that work?

On 30/07/2021 at 2:13 AM, BartonThinks said:

The second part was solved by simmaster. He made a DLL that activates all four of the zones using a cheat code.

Was this part of the SC4Fix dll?

[BartonThinks 3,416]

Just now, Wiimeiser said:

Joint occupancy is a weird thing. It seems it only works when one of the two is garbage. About a decade ago I had a lot that dealt with all three utilities at once, however, while the garbage and water processing worked fine, power output was always 0 no matter what. Which begs the question of what would happen if you made a residential lot that processed garbage, would that work?

Was this part of the SC4Fix dll?

No, this was done through a separate DLL that was not released on the STEX. You can find the link a few posts above this one in my reply to Raymond.

[Propfam 2,288]

11 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

 

Nice reference, Maxis! (I refer to Section 12)

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

My first Effdir mod,  Well, though I didn't achieve my goal, However I did learn some hex editing skills and basic structure of Effdir.

It started from a request about @CorinaMarie's splendid Flora Eraser Brush. (I failed to carry out it finally @junspud)

I can use Brush (OperationID=4) to active effects, Meanwhile, I have seen flora burn or demolish effects before, so I wondered if we could use some effects to burn those flora but keep the others same, But there were not enough effects in section 14 suit to this. most of them are in section 13, then after a bit digging in Wiki, I tried to write a new one.

Trails and errors is the best way to solve puzzles, Especially to me,  It's not that hard if writing the hex data according its special format. (No doubt that I learnt all of these from CoriBoom™)

But this was just a burning effect which doesn't help on demolishing exact objects such as flora, then some other effects.

whereas there were still some effects which could have some impact on the Terrain and objects, such as :

@CorinaMarie Hiya Cori, Do you think there is still possibility to achieve this by assembling a new effect from other sections? If so, I want to give it a try one day after my Python course.

This 'tank shot' may be excess. @Barroco Hispano 

On 8/1/2021 at 2:16 AM, Barroco Hispano said:

Btw, I want to replace the textures of the SimCity 4 effects (fire, explosion, etc) but I am very lazy to look for them in the .dat files 

Sorry Alejo for being late on this, I'll check them out tomorrow.

[City_Slider 2,716]

Ok, thats the Desasters. And now something beautiful :-)

Go ahead Ray, you are on a good Way... Respect for it.

Best Regards, Oliver

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

6 hours ago, Raymond7cn said:

Hiya Cori, Do you think there is still possibility to achieve this by assembling a new effect from other sections? If so, I want to give it a try one day after my Python course.

It is prolly possible.

The key thing is understanding all the inter-relations of the sections. CB and I spent a couple of months writing a parser and that part was about 80% finished when we needed to tackle a different RL project which took a few weeks. After that was finished, we felt more like playing the game and working on quicker to finish projects.

So, the full answer is that it is entirely possible to figure out the EDir stuff, but it'll take a lot of dedicated time to do so.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hiya Alejo,@Barroco Hispano

 I could only find out these (a1.dat) may be related to Tank's fire or shoot effect, I hope it helps. 

@City_Slider Hiya Oliver, Thank you for your powerful and encouraging words, Actually, I was just learning along the step of giants (CoriBoom™)

@CorinaMarie Yes Ma'am, I could understand your words very well, Especially in this case, we need to parser and figure out most of infos in Effdir, as one of alternative option which came from the tests I made today, This effect maybe useful:

It's in section 13 named "stream_cut_fx_terrain", I used cheat code (CB's tea) 'effect' for a efficient test, then you can tell it seemed to only demolish the network and flora, whereas the growable lots kept the same. I couldn't figure out the mechanism within since it simply points to section 4 - 24, Anyway, It maybe useful by tweaking some arguments there.

I also played a bit of disasters today, Indeed we can create more of them if the puzzle of Effdir is solved someday, Besides, I found they all have been defined in hardcode in a way, the ManagerID and item Button ID there invoke specific function of hardcode, by effect name property we can also call effects in section 13 with the same name, some of them could have some impacts on terrain as well:

I wanted to add a pipe_burst disaster, but It crashed to desktop everytime.